


Somewhere I Have Never Travelled

by Hlessi



Category: The Hobbit (2012), The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Kink Meme, M/M, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-01
Updated: 2013-02-01
Packaged: 2017-11-27 19:46:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/665762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hlessi/pseuds/Hlessi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes the heart is cruel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Somewhere I Have Never Travelled

**Author's Note:**

> Response to [this prompt](http://hobbit-kink.livejournal.com/3138.html?thread=3855682#t3855682) over at the Hobbit Kink Meme.
> 
> (Except for the happy ending...)

When Bilbo was eleven years old, his mother put one hand on the back of his head, took his chin between a thumb and two fingers, and tenderly turned his face toward his shoulder.

Her smile was warm on his ear and her fingertips tickled him as she brushed the curls away, but Bilbo held very, very still. He was holding his breath, and even his heart was hardly daring to beat.

The fingers holding his chin stiffened.

_“Oh,”_ his mother whispered, in such a voice as Bilbo had never heard from her before.

Without looking at him, stepping behind Bilbo so that he could not see her face, she moved to his right and turned his head and pulled back the tousled hair that covered his right ear.

_“Oh,”_ she said again, only then her voice was low and sad and _hurt_ , quiet in a way that made his scarcely beating heart shrink even further from the question he was holding between his teeth.

“Oh, my Bilbo.” Her arms were around him, her hands clutching at his shoulders. His mother clasped him tight, her face in his young, golden hair, and she was holding him to her, his face pressed against her neck that smelled faintly of lily of the valley, holding him to her as if she would hide him away from everything and everyone.

“Mummy,” he said softly, dazedly. He put his small arms around her neck, because he did not know what else to do.

Bilbo felt his mother trembling, so he rubbed her back and shushed her like she always did for him.

\- - - 

Ten years later, when Bilbo was one-and-twenty, his mother took quill and ink and drew the shapes of his flowerings on a scrap of vellum.

With every jagged edge and straight, implacable line, with every strange, foreign point and every absence of softness or grace, Bilbo's heart beat louder and louder. The scratch of the nib staining the vellum black filled his ears, and his eyes stung as if he would weep though there were no tears.

When his mother lifted the quill-point from the parchment, she had scribed two lines of angular shapes, severe and unsparing, one beneath the other.

“You've written two,” said Bilbo faintly.

“There are two, Bilbo,” said his mother, every word an ache. “One each.”

His hands were on his ears before he could keep them away, fingers pressing one against where his flowering ought to have been and one where there ought to have been nothing. Bilbo's eyes went, helplessly, to his mother's own left ear, the heart ear.

He knew the shape of her flowering from his cradle. He'd grown up seeing it, a wide-eyed babe against her shoulder reaching with his babe's hand to brush away her hair and press back her finely pointed ear, looking for the leafed and blossoming whorls of Old Hobbitish lettering, _bungo baggins_ , his own father's name. He knew his mother's flowering just as he knew his father's, the long bloom of _belladonna took_ that followed the pleat of the back of his father's left ear for almost its entire curve. He had learned the proper shapes of flowerings from the flowerings of his own parents, and since he was old enough to understand why his mother kept combing away his hair to look and coo and kiss the tip of his ear, he had been waiting for his own green seedling to grow into the name of his heart's flower.

But his seedling had not bloomed. His seedling had split.

“They look like stones,” he whispered. “Not flowerings.”

“I think they are, my Bilbo.” How her voice strained and shook; there were splinters coming off of it. “These are Dwarf-letters.”

“Dwarf-letters.” Bilbo lowered his hands, his eyes on the two lines of sharp, hard shapes. “Two of them.”

“Yes. They must...they must be different names.”

_No,_ Bilbo's heart was whispering, _no, no, no._ “How can...how can there be two? I...Mother, perhaps a Dwarf...” He closed and unclosed his hands on the table between them. “Perhaps a Dwarf would not be so...but two, Mother? I don't understand.”

He was trying desperately to not sound miserable or frightened, because he could so clearly see the misery and the unease in his mother's face. Yet his voice was high and quivering, and the cheer in it was as false as a Sackville-Baggins's civility. He knew nothing of Dwarves. How could he know what kind of _so_ a Dwarf would be?

His mother looked at the letters and did not speak.

There was a creak of floorboards behind Bilbo. Before he could turn, two arms, the hands of which were still so much larger than his, came around his shoulders and held him tight.

“My boy,” said his father's voice. A low voice, usually so composed. “My son.”

His father held him close; he said nothing, but his grip was loud enough. Bilbo's ear, the left one, was pressed to his father's chest and he could hear, through his prim father's shirt and waistcoat, a stolid heart beating out its grief.

\- - - 

The first frost of winter breathed over the Shire in a blue pall, and Bilbo's mother and father came home from Bree with a fist of stained and folded vellum.

“We found many Dwarves,” said his mother wearily, over the pungent steam of tea. “Some even polite.”

Bilbo's father was in his study, smoking his pipe. He'd looked very tired coming through the door, tired and somewhat pinched. The ride back from Buckland had done him no good. He'd always disliked ponies, especially hired ones.

Bilbo looked at his mother, but her eyes were in her teacup.

“I'm sorry, Bilbo,” she murmured. “They wouldn't read it. Not any of them. When they realized what we were asking, most wouldn't even look.”

The trepidation that had been gnawing at his belly since his parents closed the little gate in front of Bag End and trudged hand-in-hand down the Hill three days earlier now became an odd pang in his chest. “None?”

“I'm sorry.” The skin around her eyes and mouth became lined. “Dwarves are so _excessively_ tight-lipped.” She sighed, and muttered something like _If only Gandalf were here._

She'd warned him that this might be the case, though she did not remind him of that now. Bilbo chewed his lip. “Mother. I...what if, I mean...”

She was looking at him so very softly, yet the words would not come out of his mouth. Even thinking of showing his flowerings to someone not his parents, someone not even related, someone not even a _hobbit_ , was...was...

“Oh,” Bilbo cried bitterly, though not loudly, because he did not want to disturb his father. “Oh, I wish I had none. I wish I hadn't flowered at all!”

His mother's lips moved silently, but she did not rebuke him. She only sipped at her tea, glancing out the kitchen window and into the cold night.

“My brothers Isengrim and Isengar have no seedlings.” She spoke indistinctly, as if to no one in particular despite Bilbo being the only other person in the kitchen. “Isengrim never minded, but Isengar went to sea over it.” The teacup clinked against its saucer. “So many hobbits don't have flowerings anymore, but Tooks mostly do. I always wondered if what made Isengar so restless was not having a heartflower or not being like the rest of us.”

Most of the Bagginses didn't have flowerings either, Bilbo knew, except for Aunt Rosa. It was a matter of some unspoken contention between the Bagginses and the Tooks, the feeling that it was Belladonna's and Hildigrim's faults that Bungo and Rosa had been born with seedlings. As if they'd put them there.

“Bilbo,” his mother said suddenly, “do you understand why your father and I feel as we do?”

Bilbo's head came sharply up. “I...” His eyes were stinging again.

“It isn't that your heart's flower is a Dwarf,” she said. Her great, dark eyes were on his face. “Or even that you have two flowerings instead of only one. That's...unusual, true, but there hasn't been a Took born who will back down from _unusual_ , and your father loves you too much for his Bagginsish side to get in the way.”

She reached over the table and took his hand in hers, still warm from the teacup.

“My Bilbo,” she said quietly, “you know that Dwarves don't live as we do. One hundred years is nothing much to them, who more often see two or even three. But you, my wee babe, you...”

Her fingers tightened over his, and her dark eyes were wet.

“My love,” said his mother, “you must be brave. Sometimes the heart is cruel.”

\- - - 

No one ever asked him if he'd flowered. Such questions were not for decent hobbits, and there was usually not the need. Those who flowered tended to find each other early, full of longing and impatience. Bilbo's own mother had wed too young but for the petaled letters behind Bungo Baggins's decidedly un-Tookish ear.

At three-and-thirty, Bilbo was alone, and soon enough people concluded, without asking a single question, that he'd no seedling to begin with. Then others came asking different questions, thinking that he was like them with his barren skin and he was a fair young lad with no reason to stop him from making his own choices. Such people had to garden for themselves, and most of them did.

Bilbo did not.

Every few years, he would think of going East to Bree, or perhaps West to Greenholm in the Far Downs. There were Dwarves in both places, traders and merchants and craftsmen who made their living among Men and hobbits, or so he had heard. Could there truly be not one Dwarf, not one in all the Lone-lands, who would read his flowerings for him? Did Dwarves not have flowerings? Did Dwarves not know pity?

The two lines of knife-edged lettering were similar but not alike, and so his mother had known since he was a child that it could not only be one name repeated. Were there two Dwarves out there, somewhere, with his name hidden behind their left ears? Had it been cut in whetted runes, or bloomed in Old Hobbitish?

Were they men, or women? Were they older? They _must_ be older, but by how much? Were they dark, were they fair, were they kind or cruel or indifferent? Were Dwarves born with seedlings, as hobbits were, or did they have nothing at all, so that no Dwarf bore Bilbo's name and his own heart had flowered twice over with the most lonely uselessness? If they had no seedlings, if they lived without any desire or expectation of an answering flower, then what sort of faces would they make for a little hobbit with their names notched behind his ears?

Would they have been grieved to have outlived him?

There were too many questions and too much to fear, and Bilbo never went to either Bree or Greenholm.

He thought of his oldest Took uncle, Thain Isengrim, who had never married and was like to die without a wife or children. He never seemed particularly happy, but neither did he ever seem particularly sad. He was simply a hobbit and a Took and a Thain, which Bilbo supposed was enough to be without adding in husband or father. Was it enough for Bilbo to take after his uncle, and content himself with being a hobbit and a Baggins and a Took and the owner of Bag End? Would it be enough, would he be happy? Or would he truly take after his uncle, and never be particularly anything?

Bilbo's parents never pressed him, for pushing was not their way. They loved him well and loved him fully, and if their joy in him was diminished by his flowerings, they did not show it. If his mother sometimes watched him with her dark, wondering eyes, she did it without censure, and he was his mother's baby at heart.

Then his parents died. Father, then Mother. Uncle Isengrim left between them.

Bilbo saw all three buried, and then he began learning what it was to be alone.

Somewhere between funeral and home, he decided that he would not go to Greenholm, nor to Bree. The scrap of vellum, not aging well, went up in a wisp of smoke on the fire. He closed his eyes and whispered an apology, and he hoped that those two names, whether men or women, older or _older_ , dark or fair, kind or cruel or indifferent, would be happy in their own ways and never know to look for him. He wished them well.

Bilbo's hair grew long over his ears, and there were no Dwarves in the Shire.

\- - - 

When Bilbo was fifty years old, he remembered his mother's words.

They stood in a corner of Beorn's house, distant from the others but near enough for the fires and the torches to give light. Thorin's grave eyes were on his face, and Fili's calm regard and Kili's breathlessness were enough to make Bilbo feel smaller than he'd ever before been. For the first time since the Eyrie, Bilbo wished with all his heart to be anywhere but where he was.

“A Dwarf's heartlode cannot be shown to anyone but family or the one whose name it shows,” said Fili, his voice hushed. “It is our great treasure and secret, second only to our...well, it's second.”

“But ours are strange,” Kili interrupted, “and no one in our family can read them. We've drawn them out and shown them to others without telling them what they were, but none of them knew anything anyway.”

“We asked Uncle if we could show it to you,” added Fili, “but he would not permit us until just lately.”

_That Azog,_ thought Bilbo. _Oh, that Orc. That miserable, miserable Orc._ He did not glance at Thorin.

“Bilbo,” said Kili, “will you look? Will you look and tell us if you can read them?”

Kili hadn't said please, but it was in his voice. The brothers looked at him with all their youth and all their hope in their eyes, desire and desperation and pride a light in their faces. To see it made Bilbo's finger _itch_ for the ring, made him put his right hand in his pocket and bite his tongue.

“Will you look,” said Thorin, because even when he was asking, Thorin Oakenshield did not ask.

Bilbo might have said no to Fili and Kili. Despite all his affection for them, all those little feelings and upheavals he tucked away into the nameless places of his heart, he might have still told them no.

“I'll do what I can,” he said weakly.

Their joy and gratitude were a breath of spring air, and then the two young Dwarves were pulling up their left sleeves. They'd come prepared, stripping down to their shirts and coats in anticipation of his answer. Thorin stood to one side, watchful and silent. He had also left off his armor, and somehow seemed even larger without it.

Fili's eyes were sharp and Kili's eyes were wide, their hair ruddy gold and pitchy black in the fitful firelight, and both were looking at him intently as they held out their bared arms.

Bilbo looked.

From elbow to wrist, their arms were much paler than the rest of them, than their rough and browned hands and fingers. Even their palms were darker than this utterly guarded flesh. White as milk, unmarred, as fragile-seeming as the unbroken shell of an egg.

Close to the wrists, down the center of the forearms, flowered his name.

Green, he saw, and petaled, verdant and blossomy, blooming tender over their skins. Small and soft, not sharp or hard or jagged or implacable or merciless. Nothing in them of stone or magnificence, or any royal metal. Everything in them of quiet and grace and little breathing things.

_bilbo baggins,_ he read, in Old Hobbitish, the letters lost to all but Tooks and flowerings.

_No,_ Bilbo's heart was whispering, _no, no, no._

The thing he had dreaded. The thing he had feared, with all his coward's heart. The presentiment of pain that had clung to him since he first opened his door to their young and younger smiles.

His mother could never have foreseen such cruelty.

If he had been a boy, or a young man with parents living, he might have wept. He might have sobbed, and there might have been no choice but truth then. But he was not a boy. Bilbo Baggins had not been a boy in many years.

He closed his hand over his ring hard enough for pain.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

Two hands clenched into fists, and veins pulsed under the flowerings. Neither spoke. They pulled their arms back, and Bilbo kept his eyes lowered because he could not, in that moment, have borne to see their faces for all the Dragon-gold in the world, much less one-fourteenth share of one mountain's worth. He watched the floor as Fili turned away, as Kili took a long, shuddering breath, and then the brothers were abruptly gone, their departing treads stiff. Bilbo had always found it uncommon strange how loud sorrow could be in a person's steps.

His ears were cold, and there was something like a shadow of loss on his heart.

“You are not the first who could not answer them.” Thorin's voice was unfamiliarly gentle. “They will be themselves by morning.”

“I'm sorry,” Bilbo said again, without looking up.

A touch, against his left hand. Thorin's fingers brushing his. Bilbo was so startled that he raised his head.

By Thorin's face, Bilbo could not have told that their hands were touching. “You were not surprised by our talk of heart's lodes. Is it the case that hobbits have them as well?”

The Bilbo Baggins of before would have fled in embarrassment to be asked such a thing. The Bilbo Baggins of now simply said, “We call them heart's flowers. Heartflowers. Flowerings.”

“Flowerings.” Thorin's voice scraped as over rock, it went so low.

“One can only wonder what Elves call them,” said Bilbo. “Likely something along the lines of 'heart's better-than-yours.'”

In Bilbo's mind, he was certain that the name Elves had for their flowerings, if they had them, must be something too beautiful for Common Speech or hobbits. But the reluctant, grudging smile on Thorin's face made all such convictions weaken.

The fingers touching his exerted a questioning pressure.

“Do you have a flowering, Bilbo?” Thorin asked quietly, and it really was an _asking_.

Bilbo could count on one hand the number of times Thorin had called him by his name, and needed only a finger to count the number of times he'd been _asked_ something. Shy longing blushed through him even as confusion and terror scattered his thoughts. His curling hair, only tinged with gold after many years, covered his ears and the small letters behind them, and no one had managed to see them yet, _but if he should see, if he should see, oh._ His heart was trembling, one tremor following too quickly on the heels of another. He had not lied, no, not exactly, but if Thorin found out. If Thorin were to know.

He hesitated too long. Thorin's hand left his, and Bilbo knew a moment of bitterest regret. Then he saw Thorin pushing up the left sleeve of his shirt with one ringed and calloused hand.

The skin of Thorin's arm was dark from end to end. There was no pallor here, no strip of skin kept concealed from all eyes since birth. Corded with muscle, slightly veined, this was the forearm of a smith and a warrior.

Where a name should have been there was naught but skin and hair.

“I have no lodestone.” How quietly Thorin spoke now, how steadily and calmly he imparted this confidence, this treasure and secret. “Among the Dwarves, this is...unwonted.”

Bilbo could not decide if he had become hysterical and was hearing things or if Thorin had just made a pun. There was no room in his head for thinking about it; he was having to try too hard to hold back his tears.

“Many hobbits have no flowerings,” he finally managed, almost gasping. “We don't talk about it. But it's...we don't consider it shameful. Sometimes the heart is cruel.”

He clenched his fist and held his ring tight, tight, tight.

“But not always,” said Thorin. The heat of him was like standing near a furnace, or a forge. Thorin's hand found his again, and their fingers twined.

They stood together in Beorn's hall, in a corner and out of the way and with Bilbo's back against a wall but still very much in the open. Bilbo did not doubt that the others could see them. So Thorin did not touch him further, but his desire to do so was a tumult that Bilbo heard through their meeting fingers. The Dwarf's blue eyes, the blue of ice and winter and certain flowers that in the Shire betokened memory and truth, were closed, and he was standing near enough for Bilbo to smell the furs he was not wearing, the tang of the elven-blade that he did not bear, the stone and iron scent of his clean skin. All of Thorin's angers and grudges and bitterness seemed somehow blunted and watered down; there was a calm to him that had not been there only moments before, a true peace that was not just a checked temper and postponed violence. It felt like the difference between a drawn sword and a sheathed one.

Behind Thorin, at the other end of the floor, Bilbo could see Fili and Kili sitting by a fire, their bent backs speaking as loudly of grief as a father's beating heart. 

Thorin's lips moved in the black of his beard. He was singing. He was singing almost without singing, his voice almost too low for even Bilbo to hear, but he was singing.

Bilbo's heart closed and opened, like fingers or flowers. Between two breaths, quietly and with little noise, everything he had ever felt and was feeling for Thorin became love.

He gripped his ring, gripped it to curb the near-unbearable urge to scream at Thorin to stop singing. To shout that one such as Thorin Oakenshield did not sing to liars such as him. He wanted to take Fili and Kili by their young fool necks and shake them until they understood the doom they were wishing for. He wanted to slip on his ring and run away to some place no one would ever think to find him. He wanted to throw himself at Thorin's feet and clutch at his knees and beg for forgiveness. He wanted to take his letter-opener and cut away his flowerings, to rip out those blossoms by the roots. He wanted to weep and weep and weep.

He held very, very still, his whole self in their touching fingers but for those helpless and immovable pieces of him that had flowered, and he listened to Thorin sing.

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from "somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond" by e. e. cummings.


End file.
